Palantir open source two libraries – Cinch and Sysmon

Cinch and Sysmon mark the technology platform first foray into open sourcing their products

U.S technology firm Palantir (named after the mystical
omnipresent spherical stone from the world of Tolkien) have open
sourced two of the libraries behind their integration and analytic
business platform.

Cinch and
Sysmon are now
available for the community to test out, as Palantir wanted to
return the favour from using code already readily available through
Apache, Google and SourceForge. The two libraries in question are
parts from Palantir’s main products – Government and
Finance. Ari
Gesher, the curator behind the project, discussed why they were
adopting a more open approach:

We think it’s the right thing to do, to add our voice to the
chorus of developers making software available to freely use,
modify, and distribute. These two projects represent our first dip
into the open source water – we’re just getting started. As time
and other interests allow, we’ll be making other projects available
to the dev community.

We’ve chosen the Apache License,
Version 2.0 to make our contributions as free from
encumberance as possible – our hope is that many people will find
them useful and build on top of them just as we have with our own
software.

So the two libraries. Firstly we have Cinch – a Java
library that simplifies types of GUI code. It comes into
play when developing Swing applications, with the aim to MVC easier
to apply than creating more Swing friction. Cinch uses Java
annotations to reflectively wire up Models, Views, and Controllers,
which likens it to iOS’s Cocoa.

Sysmon is a lightweight platform
monitoring tool that gathers performance data when running
on the JVM. This data is gathered, packaged, and
published via Java Management Extensions (JMX)
for access using the JMX APIs and standard tools (such
as jconsole).
The team state it was originally created for use within their
cluster monitoring server and is apparently ideal for anyone
wanting to get data from a host platform into the JVM.

Both projects are under the Apache License 2.0 and available on
GitHub. The team
welcome discourse with the community regarding any queries with the
libraries. Surely this is good news that another big tech company
is finally seeing the importance of creating such an open dialogue
with developers and we look forward to future offerings from
Palantir.